The Whitney forms on a simplicial triangulation are piecewise affine differential forms that are dual to integration over chains. The so-called blow-up Whitney forms are piecewise rational generalizations of the Whitney forms. These differential forms, which are also called shadow forms, were first introduced by Brasselet, Goresky, and MacPherson in the 1990s. The blow-up Whitney forms exhibit singular behavior on the boundary of the simplex, and they appear to be well-suited for constructing certain novel finite element spaces, like tangentially- and normally-continuous vector fields on triangulated surfaces. This talk will discuss the blow-up Whitney forms, their properties, and their applicability to PDEs like the Bochner Laplace problem.
